Caught by surprise, former Raiders head coach Tom Flores loses commentating job after 21 years

LOS ANGELES - SEPTEMBER 28: Head coach Tom Flores and his Los Angeles Raiders prepare for battle against the San Diego Chargers during a game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on September 28, 1986 in Los Angeles, California. The Raiders won 17-13. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)(Photo: George Rose, Getty Images)

Recite Tom Flores’ achievements in professional football – a 10-year career as a quarterback, the first Hispanic starting quarterback in pro football history, eight years as an assistant coach, winning two Super Bowls as head coach of the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders and doing much of it while working for notoriously hands-on owner Al Davis – and you might wonder how Flores isn’t in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Flores kind of wonders about that, too.

“I don’t know. I guess I am a victim of, well, Al always thought that I was a victim of him, because the perception was that he coached the team,” Flores said. “Even with John (Madden), it was that way. John made (the Hall) under the old timers (senior category). Maybe I will make it under the old timers. I think I’m eligible for that next year.”

Davis was the complex and controversial maverick managing general partner of the Raiders, the team with which Flores has been most associated with in his 59 years in professional football as a player, coach and broadcaster. For seven years as a player, seven years as an assistant coach, nine years as a head coach and 21 years as a radio color commentator, Flores has been a Raider first and foremost.

That association took an unexpected turn in mid-July for Flores, a long-time Indian Wells resident. After 21 years on the job and just three weeks short of the first preseason game of the new season, Flores was informed by the Raiders that he and his play-by-play partner Greg Papa would not return to the Raiders Radio Network for the 2018 season.

Former NFL head coach of the Oakland Raider's Tom Flores at his Indian Wells home, August 9, 2018.(Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

“It caught me by surprise. Papa got in a little hot water,” Flores said. “He said some things, and he shouldn’t have said them publicly or on the air, and it upset the ownership. That’s been going on for the last two or three years, so that didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was they waited so long to make my decision.”

Flores and Papa were replaced by long-time broadcaster Brent Musburger and former Raider player Lincoln Kennedy. Musburger lives in Las Vegas, which will become the Raiders' home in 2020.

“I’m going to be doing something. Some appearances, some in-house stuff, but that won’t start until the regular season starts,” said Flores, an Indian Wells resident for more than two decades. “They will do some things for National Hispanic Month that I’ll be involved with. There are a lot of things we can do. I have already been to Vegas (the Raiders' home starting in 2020) about four or five times.”

Whatever the new position is, it will be the latest step in Flores’ long-time association with the Raiders and with professional football.

In a sense, Flores’ seven-decade journey in football has taken him on just a three-hour drive, the distance from the San Joaquin Valley farming community of Sanger to Oakland. A star at Sanger High School, Fresno City College and then the University of Pacific in Stockton, Flores signed with the Raiders for the inaugural American Football League season in 1960. Flores started 13 of 14 games at quarterback that season to become professional football’s first Hispanic starting quarterback. It was a milestone he said he didn’t think about much at the time.

“I was the first in a lot of things. The first (Hispanic) head coach, first general manager,” he said matter-of-factly.

Flores didn’t win his first Super Bowl ring with the Raiders, though. That came in the 1969 season as a backup quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, the Raiders’ AFL rival who beat Minnesota 16-7 in Super Bowl IV.

“We had a great team,” Flores said of the Chiefs that year. “And the Raiders had a great team. Those were the two best teams in pro football that year.”

With his playing career apparently over after the 1969 season, Flores received a call from the Buffalo Bills, where he had played in 1967 and 1968, asking for his help as a coach in running the team’s offense. One year later, Davis signed Flores as an assistant coach with the Raiders to work with wide receivers and quarterbacks, even though Flores wasn’t convinced he wanted to coach.

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Former NFL head coach of the Oakland Raider's Tom Flores at his Indian Wells home, August 9, 2018.(Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

“After the first year I was exhausted. I was trying to do too much, trying to please everyone, and I was exhausted,” Flores said. “And I was young. So after the season I said I have to think about this. If I want to do this, I want to do it right. So I listened to everyone I could.”

Flores’ second Super Bowl ring came as an assistant to Raiders head coach John Madden when the team won the Super Bowl after the 1976 season. Just two years later, Madden left for a career in broadcasting, and Davis offered the head coaching job to Flores.

In just his second year as head coach and with Jim Plunkett at quarterback, Flores led the Raiders to a 27-10 Super Bowl victory over the Philadelphia Eagles. Two years later, Flores and the Raiders faced the challenge of moving from Oakland to Los Angeles for the 1982 season, a season that was already in turmoil because of a player’s strike.

“We never had a home game,” said Flores, recalling that the team would practice in Oakland during the week, then fly to Los Angeles for games. “The next year I moved into the LAX Hyatt and I lived there for 14 months.”

In the team’s second year in Los Angeles, the Raiders won their second Super Bowl under Flores and third in team history with a 38-9 rout of the Washington Redskins. The Raiders made the playoffs each of the next two years, and Flores remained with the Raiders until the end of the 1987 season, when he admits he just couldn’t take the position – or the owner – anymore.

“I was exhausted. Al wore me out,” Flores said. “He told me when he hired me, don’t let me make you sick. He always thought that 10 years was the max that you should be in the job. Well, I finished nine.”

After a year away from the game, Flores was hired as president and general manager of the Seattle Seahawks. Three years later, he added head coach to his duties. But after a 14-34 record over three seasons with the Seahawks -- a stretch that many believed hurt Flores' Hall of Fame chances -- Flores was fired by Seattle.

In a way, that’s what brought Flores to the Coachella Valley.

“My wife, I said where do you want to go? Do you want to go back to the Bay Area? We had lived there a long time. Do you want to go back to the Manhattan Beach area? We thought about Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side for a permanent home, tax wise,” Flores said. “She said no. We had a condo over here in La Quinta on the Dunes Course (at La Quinta Resort). She said I want to live here. She loved the desert. She doesn’t play golf or tennis, but she loves the desert. So we moved here.”

But Flores still wanted to be part of football, a subject that came up in a lunch in Los Angeles with Davis.

“I went to have lunch with Al one day when they were still in L.A. and he said, ‘What to you want to do?’” Flores said. “I said I don’t know, but I’ve got to do something. I need to stay in the game. He said, well, let’s think about it.”

That led to Flores taking over the vacant analyst job for the Raiders radio network in 1997, a job he held until this summer.

A framed picture of Tom Flores from the Latin American International Sports Halls of Fame 32nd annual induction banquet.(Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

As the new NFL season begins with Flores in an undefined role with the team, he looks back with an appropriate amount of pride at his accomplishments for the Silver and Black.

“I thought it was remarkable. I didn’t think about it until everything was over, but that’s pretty hard to do,” Flores said. “Your second year as a head coach you win a Super Bowl and then three years later you win another one in a different city, living in a hotel for 14 months, working for Al Davis. For that I deserve a medal of honor or something.”

So far for Flores, that honor has not included induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Flores has been nominated numerous times but never received the 80 percent of the vote needed from the selection committee to don the Hall’s gold jacket. In 2017, Florida Congressman Darren Soto, supported by numerous Hispanic House representatives, introduced House Resolution 461, urging Flores' inductions to the Hall.

How can winning four Super Bowl rings and being one of just two men – Mike Ditka is the other – with a ring as a player, an assistant coach and a head coach still not have Flores in the Hall? He says part of it is his quiet personality, and maybe the idea that other candidates are on television and more visible. And a process that can become too political might hurt his candidacy, he said.

“I have heard from guys who are in that room that politics are involved, one guy outshouts another guy,” Flores said. “The system is much different than baseball. And (the voters) can hardly wait to get a new guy in right away. They are doing it on T.V already.”

With another potential nomination for the Hall of Fame a year away, Flores for now is concentrating on the Raiders, both present and future. The future in Las Vegas has Flores a bit conflicted. He’s sorry his radio job ended before the move to Nevada.

“I thought it would have been fun doing a game in Vegas, to see this thing come to fruition,” Flores said. “And the excitement about the new stadium, there is always excitement when you go somewhere new, and the Raiders being in Vegas will be exciting there.”

But could the Raiders lose some of their intimidating aura in Las Vegas, with hard-core Raiders fans in Oakland and with fans from visiting teams flocking for a game and a weekend in Las Vegas?

“We are losing the Black Hole, our hometown intimidation, because it is going to be a different crowd every week, and I don’t like that,” Flores said. “Wherever we go there are Raider Nation fans, in the hotel or on the street, wherever we go. But this is going to be different.”